The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  This spell is hard but not impossible to break. In my case it was shattered by the bite of a poisonous jellyfish. In my paddling trance I had spooned up the tentacles of a floating Portuguese man-of-war, and one tentacle – a long gelatinous noodle – slipped down the shaft of my paddle and was flipping around my forearm. The pain was almost immediate: the poison is a neurotoxin, attacking the nerves the way the jellyfish immobilizes its prey. My arm was fiercely stung as I plucked off the tentacle, and then I summoned Rick.

  He reminded me gently that the folk remedy is urine. I had tried that without any success in Vanuatu. Papaya leaves or meat tenderizer would have been more effective, and would have spared me three hours of numbing agony.

  But the spectacular landscape eased the pain – it had that capacity to bewitch. They were not simple ledges, but rather a multitude of sharp green pinnacles all over the face of the cliff. The whole mountainside had the look of a gothic church in a fantasy – hundreds of steeples and cupolas. Even with my stinging arm in this choppy sea, I would rather be here among the cathedral-like contours of the cliffs on this high island than seeing its architectural equivalent in Europe – and I knew that the next time I saw Westminster Abbey or Notre-Dame I would be instantly reminded of the soaring Na Pali coast and miss it terribly.

  The ancient Hawaiians must have known how strange and magical these pinnacles seemed, for – down to the last green cone – they called the whole lot of them keiki o ka ’aina, “children of the land,” and gave each one a different name.

  We passed “a flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which floated the bleatings of wild goats. On three sides the grim walls rose, festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and pierced by cave entrances.” This is Jack London’s description of the Kalalau Valley and beach, which is the setting for his powerful story, “Koolau the Leper” (and it is true in most of its details). This valley is as far as anyone can get on foot. The rest of the coast is reachable only by the various tour boats, big and small, which trundle back and forth. And there are helicopters buzzing on high – dipping into the valleys, hovering over the cliffs. Two today were passing the lovely stone arch at the mouth of Honopu Valley, the so-called “Valley of the Lost Tribe,” where a pre-Hawaiian people (their origin is the subject of archeological dispute) flourished.

  Opinion is divided on the choppers of Kauai. Except for the operators themselves, most people on Kauai would like to see them vanish into the sunset. But there is no question that the chopper, the most versatile of aircraft, offers an unusual way of seeing the Na Pali coast. They are numerous and intrusive and noisy, but their worst fault is not the noise pollution to others but the way they deafen their own passengers – the sound of the rotors drowns out the wind whistling through the valleys, the water music of mountain cataracts, the crashing of the waves against the sea-cliffs; and it gives the false impression that this hidden coast is easily accessible.

  “They’re kind of a pain,” Rick said. This was as close as he ever came to stating his anger, but modest as these words seemed they represented for him blind fury. “I don’t want to think about them.”

  On some days, Zodiacs – huge rubber dinghies – took tourists along the coast, splashing back and forth, mercilessly wetting the passengers and giving them the impression they were on a do-or-die expedition. But the Zodiacs, though noisy and just as intrusive as the choppers, are very safe. If you listen carefully to one boatman talking to another you might hear the following exchange.

  “How many burgers you had today?”

  “Twenty-three burgers this morning, eighteen this afternoon.”

  “Lenn had thirty-some-odd burgers all week.”

  It was their way of referring to boat passengers, and although it was utterly dismissive, there was something horribly appropriate in calling a big sunburned tourist a “burger.”

  We passed Awaawapuhi Valley, the narrowest and most dramatic of the valleys, where on the tight strip of the valley floor there had been an extensive old Hawaiian settlement.

  There was also once a large settlement of Hawaiians living in a traditional way at the next valley, Nualolo Aina. In fact, so hidden was this valley that the people remained as they had been for centuries, living undisturbed into the early twentieth century. They were alii or nobles in the valley, and just outside it a shoreside village called Nualolo Kai was inhabited by commoners. The foundations of the dancing pavilions, the houses and temples, garden walls and many other structures – excavated and catalogued by Sinoto – still remain, inside and outside the valley. We returned to them the following day and I was astonished by how closely they resembled the ones I had seen 2,000 miles away in the Marquesas.

  Under the cliffs, which were like black turrets, we made for the valley of Miloli’i. Off in the distance the sun was setting behind the privately owned island of Niihau and its neighbor, the little lumpy volcano of Lehua. We were paddling in a headwind. I hate headwinds. I had thought that everyone hated headwinds.

  Rick said, “It kind of cools you,” and paddled uncomplainingly onward.

  That night we camped on the sand of Miloli’i – baked potatoes and grilled fish over an open fire. Afterwards we talked for a while, and then Rick crept down the beach.

  I sat by the fire, stirring the coals, and feeling drowsy. I had had some happy times paddling through the Pacific, but their origin had been sights and sounds. I had not experienced much comfort. The hardship had been necessary to the discoveries I’d made. But this was different, this was one of the most pleasant interludes in my trip. It was luxury – the meal, the fire, the night air, and most of all my fatigue, which was like the voluptuous effect of an expensive drug. I loved being numb, utterly senseless, and sitting there dead tired on the soft sand, and then simply easing myself down onto my sleeping-bag, and subsiding.

  It was magic, memorable slumber. I slept under a full moon that was as bright as an arc light. All night the surf dumped and slid on the steeply shelving sand. In the early hours of the morning I was wakened by something tickling my nose – a fat and over-ambitious ghost crab perplexed by the task of eating my face, or perhaps wondering how to drag me into its hole in the sand. I slapped the thing away and went back to sleep.

  I had thought that nothing could equal the thrill of those cliffs seen from a kayak. I was wrong, for the next day, headed back to Nualolo Kai to look at ruins, we saw some splashing out at sea – probably dolphins – and we headed in that direction. I was totally unprepared for what we were about to see – dolphins, in every direction, dolphins. There were sixty or seventy of them, a variety called spinners, four or five feet long, and some babies. They were jumping clear of the water, swimming upside down, frolicking in groups, and swimming in a vast irregular circle about a quarter of a mile in diameter. And they were gasping. I had always seen dolphins from a bigger noisier craft, so I had not known anything about the sounds they make – how they breathe and sigh and blow. Every time they break the surface they gasp, like a swimmer sucking air, and hearing this laboring breath, which is the most affecting and lovable human noise, I was struck by how much we miss when we can’t hear the creature we are looking at.

  “Kind of neat,” Rick said.

  Even the experienced guide was amazed. He had been down this coast hundreds of times and he had never seen anything like it, he said. For the next hour and a half we played with them, paddling among them, and they performed for us. We made no sound, we posed no threat, we merely watched appreciatively – and they seemed to realize that.

  After this, who wouldn’t paddle into Nualolo Kai, and put ashore, and walk to the great heiau, or temple, against the cliff face and leave an offering? We wrapped round stones in freshly plucked ti leaves, and placed them on the wall with a wish that we would have a safe trip and would return.

  At the end of the trip, riding the surf into Polihale I was very happy, with the pure joy that comes to the traveler whose efforts are rewarded – in my case ha
ndsomely, with the sight of those cliffs and ruins, and the antics of those dolphins. Our little boats had given us the greatest freedom. The Hawaiians had always known that simple fact. And it was as true of the dead as it was of the living. In the cliffs above the broad white sand of Polihale hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses had been found, and the luckiest – the most noble – had been buried in their canoes, like the greatest Vikings in the bogs and burial places of England.

  25

  Niihau and Lanai: Some Men are Islands

  “What you see ahead is Niihau, the Forbidden Island,” the chopper pilot said, as his flying-machine went quack-quack-quack across the seventeen miles of channel that separated this small arid place from the friendly green island of Kauai.

  “We’ll be landing pretty soon,” he went on, “but I just want you to know that I can’t show you any of the people, we can’t enter the village – you won’t even be able to see it, I’m afraid. In fact, most of the island is off limits, and it has been for over a hundred years.”

  And then he steered us south, through the clear Hawaiian air, into the nineteenth century.

  Hawaii is full of marvels, but one of the strangest aspects of this chain of eighteen islands is that two of them are private property, and neither of them is owned by an ethnic Hawaiian. Some characters in literature also have private islands: they take possession of islands in much the same spirit that they head into exile – in Shakepeare’s The Tempest Prospero does both. Usually, a person seeking an island craves simplicity and glories in a world that is still incomplete, and therefore full of possibilities. Anything can happen on an island – guilt can be expiated (Robinson Crusoe), the forces of good and evil can emerge in the breasts of castaways (Lord of the Flies), love can be discovered (The Blue Lagoon), so can a great fortune (Treasure Island) or a true paradise (Typee), or a kind of hell (Conrad’s Victory); it can be the setting for a great departure (the Nantucket of Moby-Dick), or for the oddest landfalls on earth (Gulliver’s Travels). It is impossible to imagine these island episodes unfolding on the mainland.

  The common denominator is not the landscape of the island, or its location on the globe, but rather the fact of a place being surrounded by water – the character of the water itself is the magic element, offering the islander transformation. The water, seemingly nothing, is everything – a moat, a barrier, a wilderness, the source of food and hope, the way out. The ocean – as any true seagoing person will testify – is not one place but many. The sea has specific moods and locations, as any landscape of hills and valleys does. It even has thoroughfares. Oceania is full of ancient named waterways – the paths to other islands or archipelagos. A piece of water off the Big Island is known as Kealakahiki, “The Way to Tahiti” (2,500 miles away), one of the great canoe routes.

  A person who emigrates to an island is obviously different from a native islander. There is something rather suspect about a person who seeks to recapture island innocence. But in any case it is a futile search, because no one really can take possession of an island. Being the monarch of all you survey is in reality a mainland conceit; on an island it is you who are possessed. Islands have a unique capacity to take hold of their inhabitants, whether they be natives or castaways or potential colonizers, and that is perhaps why islands are so rich in myths and legends.

  An island ought to seem fragile and isolated, and yet I visited fifty-one islands in Oceania and every one of them seemed like a thing complete in itself, self-contained and self-sufficient, because of the surrounding water. Whether that was an illusion or not I don’t know, but this sense of mystery and power must communicate itself both to those who are native to the islands and those who seek them.

  There is something princely in the very situation of someone who builds a house on an island and lives in it. But an island is much more than a principate. It is the ultimate refuge – a magic and unsinkable world.

  Owning an island is something like having this entire world to yourself, where you can do as you like – making your own rules, fulfilling a vision or a fantasy. The two private islands of Niihau and Lanai are dramatic examples of that, but they are moving in totally different directions.

  Niihau is quite small and so obscure and so seldom visited it is called “The Forbidden Island.” Hawaii’s second private island, Lanai, is fairly large and has not been much on the tourist map and is hardly known, except as a Dole plantation. Its nickname is “The Pineapple Island.” Each place is extraordinary in its own way. The owner of Lanai is just now ending its seventy-year tradition of pineapple-growing and has invested heavily, with two luxury hotels, in the tourist industry. In great contrast to this, the owner of Niihau long ago decreed that nothing would change on his island and his descendants have kept to that promise – forbidding any outsider from entering the community of Hawaiian-speaking people, or looking closely at the land or its inhabitants.

  “If any island is inviolate, it is Niihau,” Hawaii’s historian Gavan Daws wrote almost thirty years ago; “if any man is an island, it is Niihau’s patriarch.”

  One of the pleasures of the Hawaiian island derives from the fact that no beach is private. A tycoon might have a mansion jammed squarely against the sand, but the law allows you to use that same beach, sunning yourself and swimming in the surf. The beaches belong to everyone. And even on the most remote or exclusive beaches there is public access.

  The single exception to this is Niihau. I wanted to take my collapsible kayak there. I was told that this was out of the question, that the sand and even the water around the island – to ten fathoms – was private.

  Because of its isolation, Niihau has acquired an extensive mythology – the unknown always passes for something particularly wonderful. The very idea of Niihau fascinates people in Hawaii, and to nearly everyone it suggests Shangri-la. Tell someone you’ve been to Niihau and their face becomes brilliant with curiosity.

  “What was it like?” they say. “I’ll bet it was fantastic.”

  A No Trespassing sign is like catnip to a travel writer. I was determined to find out about the island, and to visit it if possible. I discovered that there were occasional heliccopter tours, but – to maintain Niihau’s low profile – the service was never advertised. In the end, interviewing informants, and finding the chopper, and making the trip, turned out to be a bit like mounting an assault on Alcatraz, another Pacific island that Niihau physically resembles.

  Niihau was sold for $10,000 to a family of wealthy wandering Scots by the Hawaiian king (Kamehameha V) in 1864. The family successfully transformed this Polynesian volcano into a Scottish estate, turning the islanders into tenants and themselves into lairds. They were muscular Christians. They decreed that everyone on the island would attend church. They discouraged smoking. They forbade the drinking of alcohol. They fortified the church and distributed Bibles, in the Hawaiian language. Even today, in an island on which the main language is Hawaiian, the only reading material in that language is the Bible and the hymn book, and the same prohibitions persist. Little wonder that (as a former resident wrote in 1989), “A favorite pastime of the children is trying to stump each other by reciting phrases from the Bible” – guessing chapter and verse. Fishing, manual work and games are forbidden on the sabbath.

  In theory it is a sober and pious island of twelve Hawaiian families (inevitably related). Ask anyone in Hawaii and they will tell you that it is a unique preserve of native culture, of people living in the old way, fishing and farming, preserving the island traditions.

  This is of course ridiculous. At best the island is a throwback to the days of soul-saving missionary paternalism in which the hula was banned and singing generally disapproved of, and islanders seeking work were allowed to look after the owner’s livestock. It is an insular ghost from the age when Polynesia was condemned as lazy and needing to atone for its Original Sin. Oddly enough, the island and the stubborn, backward-looking Robinson family which owns it have more defenders than attackers, because casual onlooker
s enjoy the fantasy that an island has been trapped in time – indeed, that traditions have been preserved. Although last year the islanders voted Democratic (for the popular and progressive mayor of Kauai, JoAnn Yukimura), the Niihauans have usually been as staunchly conservative as the Robinson family – they voted against statehood in 1959, the only precinct in the islands to reject joining the United States. Yet it is not possible to stop the clock, even on an offshore island.

  So what is Niihau tradition now? It is the language – perhaps the only community in the entire state whose daily conversation is Hawaiian. It is the preservation of family units – and extended families – which are said to live in harmony. It is the practice of fishing – but only by the men and boys; the women are home-makers, and many of them search the island’s beaches for the tiny Niihau shells, which they pierce and fashion into precious and exquisite necklaces – much coveted by people the world over who appreciate their rarity. And it is churchgoing.

  Apart from all that piety, Niihau tradition is now also welfare checks, food stamps, soda pop and canned food. In the houses with electrical generators, it is video machines. The windward side of Niihau is so horrendously littered with plastic rubbish that has floated from the other island that it was pictured as a sort of spoiled Eden in a recent Time magazine. There is no hula, there are no canoes. And their racial purity is another myth, for there is a strain of Japanese blood on the islands.